Indonesia becomes MOST DANGEROUS place on the internet

Tops China to claim crown as main source of poison packets in Akamai study

Indonesia has had the dubious honour of supplanting China as the number one source of attack traffic globally in the second quarter, according to the latest stats from content delivery and security firm Akamai.

The vendor’s State of the Internet report for Q2 found Indonesia accounted for 38 per cent of the world’s attack traffic, almost double the previous quarter’s 21 per cent.

China's share of naughtiness actually dropped by one point, to 33 per cent for Q2, while the US showed another decline – from 8.3 per cent to 6.9 per cent.

However, before we all start training our guns on Indonesia, Akamai admitted in the report that attribution remains problematic. That is, online criminals hiding out in Eastern Europe may simply be using compromised machines in Indonesia through which to route attacks.

If nothing else, then, the stats prove that the country – the world’s fourth most populous – has a major challenge in cleaning up its IP address space, as does China. Using the same rationale, this is an area where the US seems to be doing pretty well of late.

The Asia-Pacific is by far the world’s worst offender, now accounting for a mammoth 79 per cent of observed attacks compared to around 10 per cent each for Europe and the Americas.

As for where the attacks are targeting, the majority were against Port 80 (HTTP traffic) and Port 443 (HTTPS/SSL) which accounted for 24 per cent and 17 per cent respectively.

DDoS attacks also continue to increase globally, by 54 per cent over the first quarter to 318 reported cases. While the Americas were by far the biggest target, accounting for 202 of these, attacks against APAC customers tripled to 79 in Q2.

However, Akamai noted that this statistic is “primarily driven by a continuing series of attacks on a small number of companies within the region, and as such may not indicate a long-term change to the distribution of attacks worldwide”.

Elsewhere in the report, Akamai noted that global average connection speeds climbed 5.2 per cent to 3.3Mbps, while adoption of “high broadband” (10Mbps+) grew an impressive 13 per cent on the previous quarter to account for 14 per cent of connections.

South Korea remains the home of the world's speediest average connections at 13Mbps, while Hong Kong comes top for highest average peak connection speed (65.1Mbps).

Mobile data grew 14 per cent from the previous quarter while voice traffic saw much slower growth, edging up only 5 per cent since Q2 2012, the report found. ®